Michel Houellebecq

My view of Houellebecq was once framed by a kind of adolescent admiration. The plaid French intellectual chain-smoking his way through pack after pack of Gaulloises. Accepting the Impac literary award in wine stained corduroy trousers and a crumpled shirt. Ha ha yes! Go f*** yourself literati!

I loved the cruel honesty of Atomised, Houellebecq's very refusal to offer any kind of closure or romanticised resolution. At the best of times his observations of modern Europe are delightfully cruel. The loss of you’re car – tantamount to being struck off the social register / The hippy commune who leave their infants to crawl around naked in their own s*** / and then in the early 70’s turn into smut aficionado’s because there’s no ideology which guides them, but simply a crude desire to deviate from bourgeois normality.

These observations were horrible and brilliant, a knife in the guts of John Grisham, the Guide du Routard / Houellebecq’s mother (or “the old w****” as he delightfully christens her). Above all it was Bruno and Micheal who shone as two beautiful, incandescent portraits of failure.

When Bruno’s one genuine hope for love was left lying dead on a mortuary table, he should have smashed his Citroën into the tree right there, redemption is impossible, nothing but depravity and suffering are possible. But then comes the catch, and as the novel slides into an easy Huxilian fantasy there is we learn a crudely penned hope for humanity. Houellebecq seems to hold a distinct fondness for this pacifying utopia, exists in numerous forms throughout his three novels, be it Thai Sex Holiday resort, a package holiday in Lanzarote, or nutty religious cult.

The brutality and suffering of modern existence all seem to be happily resolved when our stern critic finds his desires met. Sex, sunshine and cloning seem to extinguish Houellebecq’s anger with disappointing ease. More than any other novel preceding it “The Possibility of an Island” is content to languish in this territory.

This enfant terrible of French literature is actually a rather genial old soul, content to live out eternity not in some drug-induced orgy, but rather pottering about the confines of his futuristic home with a cloned Corgi.

Houellebecq is impotent not in a sexual sense but ideologically too. An increasingly fine line separates the elderly figure and his cloned corgi from the real life Houellebecq, wondering the streets of Cork, Southern Island. It makes you feel rather sorry for the man who pen’s such confused adolescent portraits of women. The female characters in “possibility…” seem to exist in a vacuum outside of culture or humanity. Once a fan of Houellebecq I find this novel so puerile and lazily written that its hardly worth engaging with.

All in all, a big let down